2025 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A year in review

Looking back, 2025 was a year of significant milestones for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. From a game-changing presence at Red Hat Summit to the launch of Ansible Automation Platform 2.6, the year was filled with a number of exciting new features and momentum!

Automation synergy: Red Hat + HashiCorp

Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019, and in 2025 IBM announced its acquisition of HashiCorp. This made a powerful statement on the future of enterprise automation and hybrid cloud management. Together with HashiCorp's Terraform for Infrastructure-as-Code and Vault for secret management, and Ansible Automation Platform's configuration and deployment capabilities, modern enterprise IT organizations have a trusted, reliable end-to-end automation platform for the AI era.

Read more about how Red Hat and HashiCorp are better together.

Making a splash at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest

Following the HashiCorp acquisition announcement, Red Hat's signature event Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest was held in Boston. As usual, automation was a hot topic, especially in key focus areas like Ansible Automation Platform's value in AI workflows.

During the event, we highlighted the launch of Ansible Automation Platform 2.5, setting a strong foundation for October's Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 release. These milestones set the course for future Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 users, who gain the full advantage of the enhancements and performance upgrades introduced in the 2.5 release (in addition to everything included in 2.6).

Introducing Ansible Automation Platform 2.6

The launch of Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 was the highlight of the Ansible team's year, delivering new features, platform enhancements, and strategic integrations to help you continue to build a resilient, trusted foundation for the next generation of IT operations.

Three major features in the 2.6 release include:

• Automation dashboard: A new utility to help your organization demonstrate value and measure return on investment (ROI). It provides real-time actionable insights, enabling smarter data-driven decisions.
• Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant: A generative AI chat embedded directly into the UI. It provides support for platform administration and management, complemented by the Lightspeed coding assistant for automation code creation.
• Self-service automation portal: Enables IT operations teams to adopt a platform engineering approach to automation. It simplifies automation service delivery with a user-friendly point-and-click interface for non-experts, allowing platform admins to share automation while maintaining full control and consistency.

The 2.6 release also expands Ansible Lightspeed with bring your own model (BYOM) support, allowing you to choose the LLM provider that fits your needs. The intelligent assistant now supports Red Hat AI, OpenAI, and Azure OpenAI model providers. Our roadmap includes support for IBM watsonx.ai and Google Gemini model providers in early 2026.

The coding assistant is also rapidly expanding provider support. IBM watsonx Code Assistant is generally available, with Google Gemini support launched in December 2025. Support for OpenAI and Azure OpenAI model provider integrations are also scheduled for early 2026.

Beyond these highlights, the 2.6 release also included upgrades such as Event-Driven Ansible enhancements, platform UI improvements, and AI-assisted inventory generation. Check out our What's new in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 blog to learn more!

Top Ansible content from 2025

Check out some of our most popular videos from this year to learn more about the new platform enhancements and capabilities that rolled out in 2025.

• What's new: Ansible Automation Platform 2.6
• AIOps = Artificial intelligence for IT operations
• Patch management with Ansible
• Demo: Model (MCP) + Ansible Lightspeed in future automation

For a hands-on experience and deep dives, check out these interactive demos that provide step-by-step walkthroughs of the new 2.6 features. To see how these new capabilities are delivering real world results, check out our 2025: A year of transformative customer success with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform blog, where we highlight success stories of organizations and their automation journey.

As we look towards 2026, we invite you to explore these new features and join us as we continue to innovate and lead the industry into the agentic era, where trusted automation becomes the essential bridge between AI intelligence and enterprise action.

Resources

• Explore 2025 customer stories detailing their use of Red Hat automation.
• Try interactive, hand-on exercises to explore the new features in Ansible Automation Platform 2.6
• Watch more videos about Ansible Automation Platform on YouTube
• Read more about the new updates on Ansible Automation Platform.
• Check out the FAQ about the new 2.6 release